The Motel Life Read Online Free PDF

on Fourth Street.
    Her mother was an on-and-off-again prostitute who had been fired from most of the local brothels for drinking, drugs, things like that. She’d stay up for days at a time as she liked speed. Annie told me stories about her. There were a lot of fucked-up ones, she told me, but I’d also seen it with my own eyes.
    Annie James and I met in the parking lot of that motel, and once we got to know each other she would stay some nights with me and Jerry Lee in our room. I was eighteen then. She was seventeen. She went to high school and tried hard at it. When Jerry Lee and I’d be watching TV in the evening, she’d just sit there on the bed reading or doing her homework. She was like that, worked hard. She didn’t have a temper either, she wasn’t mean like her mom. Her mom had an edge most of the time where you never knew what would happen or what she’d say. Sometimes she’d be nice, polite, and then an hour later, maybe less, you’d hear her yelling from three doors away like a crazed maniac.
    Annie James is blonde, skinny, with dark blue eyes. When I knew her, she kept her hair back in a ponytail. She was funny too, said funny things, and she had a good smile.
    The memory that came to me while I was sitting there in that diner was of a night when she was still in high school and she was spending the night at our room at the Mizpah.
    She came over late and me and Jerry Lee were in bed watching TV. She didn’t say much and just sat on the bed and soon after I fell asleep. The next time I woke it was the middle of the night and she was laying on her back listening to a small radio I kept by my bed.
    ‘Did I wake you?’ she asked.
    ‘Can’t you sleep?’
    ‘No,’ she said and I got up and went to turn on the small lamp I had on my dresser.
    ‘Please don’t turn on the light,’ she said.
    ‘It’s all right, Jerry Lee can sleep through anything.’
    In the dim light I could see her in her underwear and bra. Her left arm was turned palm up with a pillow under it and I could see three marks running horizontally across the inside of her arm.
    ‘What happened?’ I said.
    ‘I burned myself with my curling iron.’
    I moved closer to her and looked at them. They were dark red with patches of white from blistering.
    ‘You don’t curl your hair,’ I told her.
    ‘Sometimes I do,’ she said.
    ‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘you don’t have to stay there. You can stay with me. She’s crazy.’
    ‘I want to leave,’ she said. ‘But you don’t mean it, do you?’
    ‘You can stay here for good if you want.’
    ‘I might have to,’ she said finally and tried to keep herself from crying. ‘Are you sure it would be okay?’
    ‘I am,’ I said.
    ‘You think Jerry Lee would mind?’
    ‘I’ll ask him but I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘He likes you. We could get your things tomorrow.’
    ‘Let me think about how to do it without her going nuts,’ she said. ‘I’ll figure it out, okay?’
    ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Does it hurt bad?’
    ‘I put some burn cream on that I got from the drug store and that helps.’
    ‘We could go get breakfast if you’re hungry,’ I said.
    ‘I’d like to but it hurts too much to put on a shirt. I know what you could do, you could tell me a story like the ones you tell Jerry Lee.’
    ‘What do you want it to be about?’
    She was silent for a time then said, ‘Maybe it could be you and me on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. With the sun and we could go swimming all day long and sleep on the beach. But like in James Bond, you know? Like the one where he’s on that island. The one we saw the other night. If you could, you could make us like that.’
    ‘ Goldfinger? ’ I said.
    ‘Maybe. We watched a whole bunch of them, it was a marathon, don’t you remember?’
    ‘Yeah,’ I said.
    ‘Will you tell me one?’
    ‘I’ll try,’ I said and turned off the light and lay next to her on the bed.
    ‘One morning, and it was a cold one too, we went